Westcon-Comstor European boss talks AWS deal, transition away from hardware, and ‘untapped growth frontier’

Rene Klein stepped into his new role in March and wastes no time in listing his goals, including becoming the number one AWS distributor of choice

Westcon-Comstor's relatively new European boss has been tasked with streamlining and unifying the business.

The distributor is still on the up having posted a gross sales increase of 3.3 per cent to $5.24bn in its FY25 results yesterday.

But what is its European growth strategy for the rest of the year? And where would it like to finish in 2025?

Rene Klein, executive vice president, Europe tells CRN.

What was your 2024 highlight for the business?

The highlight from a European perspective was probably winning the AWS distribution deal for 30-plus countries across Europe. The distribution agreement covers the entire European Economic Area (EEA) plus Switzerland and the UK & Ireland, creating significant growth opportunities for Westcon-Comstor partners by giving them access to the AWS market-leading portfolio of cloud products and solutions.

We’re excited to be utilising our cloud capabilities, providing partners with comprehensive support designed to accelerate their AWS success. This includes helping partners to develop their AWS go-to-market strategy, access AWS funding programmes, and build technical expertise through enablement.

As part of the agreement, Westcon-Comstor is establishing a dedicated AWS cloud business unit in Europe, with a centralised centre of excellence. In-country sales, pre-sales and marketing teams will complement partner recruitment and enablement strategies and data-driven demand generation programmes.

Harnessing the expertise of Rebura, the AWS Premier Tier Services partner that we acquired earlier in 2024, we will empower partners to provide a comprehensive suite of AWS services to their customers, spanning migrations, modernisations and managed services. Rebura will support partners with technical guidance and hands-on expertise through flexible engagement models, giving them immediate access to in-demand AWS capabilities.

Our vision is to be an AWS distributor of choice, and the distribution agreement represents a major step forward on that journey, building on our Rebura capabilities and successful AWS Marketplace programme to create a unique, comprehensive AWS framework, providing partners with the expertise and support needed to accelerate their cloud business growth and ensure success in the AWS ecosystem.

What’s one goal you’d like to achieve in the business by the end of 2025?

Can I have two? Firstly, I’d love to see Comstor play a key role in enabling partners to navigate and capitalise on the opportunities presented by the Cisco 360 Partner Programme. It’s a huge change and I see it as incumbent on Comstor as a Cisco-specialist distributor to be the guiding hand for partners throughout. It would be great to be able to look back and say yes, ‘we did what we needed to do to support our partners.’

Secondly, and more broadly, I want to see Westcon-Comstor go even faster and accelerate our growth in the services space, whether that be in the more educational side with training and enablement, or on the technical side where we’re assisting partners with specific projects such as a cloud migration. In the cloud, SaaS era, it’s these value-added offerings that allow us to strengthen our relationships with partners even further by serving as their trusted advisor.

What’s top of your priority list in your role at the moment?

Having taken on this new role of executive vice president for Europe back in March, my focus is on creating a more unified, streamlined European organisation that ensures an even better and more consistent experience for our partners, vendors and employees while allowing both Westcon and Comstor to retain their own unique offering and brand identity. My aim is to create a future-ready and connected organisation with a shared culture and mindset rooted in a relentless focus on driving partner and vendor success.

What are some of the main elements of your UK and European growth strategy?

We want to continue and accelerate our transition away from traditional, hardware-based distribution towards a recurring-revenue model based on software, services and subscriptions. We feel our AWS Marketplace programme, which we launched last year to provide partners and vendors with a simplified and streamlined way of transacting, represents something unique in the market due to our reach across multiple vendors, our expertise and the way in which we guide partners through the process. We’ve had fantastic success to date and I think it’s unique, market-leading offerings like this that will enable us to continue to show true differentiation from our competitors.

Other examples would be our 3D Lab programme, which enables partners and their customers to assess and validate multi-vendor security solutions against specific use cases prior to purchase, in a dynamic virtual demo environment; and Tech Xpert, our peer-to-peer community for technical cybersecurity professionals working in the channel.

Despite macroeconomic and geopolitical uncertainty we see several growth drivers for the next 12 months, for example the shift towards hybrid enterprise environments and the need for networking refreshes and upgrades.

Meanwhile, protecting against cyber threats will remain a critical priority across the C-suite. We operate in more than 50 countries across EMEA and APAC, but the UK remains a vital market for us and we see scope for significant further growth here.

Which parts of the business are growing the most?

Cybersecurity has been a key growth driver for us in recent years and that continues to be the case, in the UK and across Europe. Within cybersecurity, Westcon’s Next-Generation Solutions (NGS) proposition for cybersecurity-focused partners and high-growth and emerging security vendors has performed extremely well and that shows no signs of changing.

Cloud represents a huge and relatively untapped growth frontier for us and our partners, especially with our unique AWS proposition, and that’s something we’re excited about when looking ahead to the next three to five years. Things like IoT also offer potential.

What are some of the biggest challenges facing the business at the moment?

In Europe there was a sense that things could be more streamlined, efficient and unified and that there was the opportunity for greater synergy across Westcon and Comstor.

That’s why the business decided to make a change and it’s what I’m addressing in my new role.

In common with other distributors, we constantly need to showcase and demonstrate our value to partners and vendors to really bring home the positive impact of working with us. Westcon-Comstor has a great story to tell in this regard, and I firmly believe that we are ahead of the vast majority of our competitors in terms of innovation and creating a future-ready business. Whether it’s in cybersecurity, networking or cloud, distribution is playing an increasingly central and strategic role in both the channel and the wider tech ecosystem - we need to embrace and capitalise on that.